Wings Over Scotland

“Flounders” might have been a more appropriate animal.

It’s painfully entertaining viewing, but Gordon Brewer’s persistence pays off right at the end as we finally discover that Scottish Labour’s answer is “No – even if a clear majority of Scottish people vote for parties explicitly calling for a second independence referendum, and return a majority of pro-indy MSPs to Parliament, we will not consider that sufficient support.”

Which would mean there was no democratic route left open to Scotland to achieve independence. So what is it that he suggests we do?

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These are the Democratic Socialists of America, a fringe-left grouping in the USA with around 60,000 members (or roughly 10 times as many as the Scottish Greens, though per capita closer to the SSP or RISE), at their conference a couple of days ago.

It’s our most fervent wish that one day the left will grasp the fact that this isn’t how you win a war.

It’s also our most abiding fear that this – with its stern admonitions against clapping, or banner-waving, or speaking to anyone who might disagree with you, or taking “fun shortcuts” or wearing “aggressive scents”, in case any of those things cause trauma to the sensitive – might as well be the SNP conference of 2022.

Let’s not blow independence in this Parliament, eh folks?

We’re pretty sure we can’t be alone in being a little perturbed by this paragraph from a story in today’s Times.

It’s public knowledge that Davidson worked for BBC Scotland before becoming a Tory MSP, but we don’t think it’s ever been revealed that she was also working as a lackey, chaffeur and seamstress for a politician.

(Presumably in her spare time, but honestly who knows?)

BBC staff – especially those working in news departments – are supposed to be impeccably politically impartial, including outside of work hours, for extremely obvious reasons. We can’t help but wonder whether there are any current BBC Scotland news broadcasters running around the country fiddling with the flies of Conservative MPs while they’re on party-political business.

Is Glenn Campbell making tea for Ross Thomson? Does Isabel Fraser polish Alister Jack’s shoes on speaking engagements? Does Andrew Kerr have to keep Bill Grant’s sash and apron nicely ironed? Is it Gordon Brewer’s job to brush Kirstene Hair’s hair or remind her to breathe in and out?

Unfortunately, as it’s the BBC there’s very little point in asking, so we’ll never know.

I went for a very long walk before writing this post, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it in the heat of anger. But 8.5 miles and 18,753 steps later it still needs to be said and there’s no getting out of it, so batten down the hatches, folks.

Last night SNP MP Mhairi Black tweeted what may be the most ill-advised, destructive, offensive, repellent and just downright idiotic thing that I’ve ever seen an elected SNP member do. (Maybe not just the SNP.)

The video, bizarrely made for the amusement of readers of comedy lad-mag website Joe.co.uk, sees Black reading out a series of supposedly “transphobic” and “mean” tweets – almost all from women and only two of which were in any way rude – and reacting to them with a toxic mixture of arrogant condescension, mockery and insults, alongside a tirade of flatly wrong and endlessly-debunked myths.

It concludes with the smirking, sniggering suggestion that women, including survivors of male violence, who’ve expressed their serious concerns over reforms to the Gender Recognition Act – concerns shared by the overwhelming majority of women, and of the population as a whole – are “Jeremy Hunts”, a piece of rhyming slang that doesn’t need any translation.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, unfortunately, but let’s look at some highlights.

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The modern world is an ideological minefield, readers, and is increasingly almost as dangerous as a real one. Having the wrong opinions about things can easily get you fired, ostracised from polite society, arrested or beaten up, and nowhere is this more the case than in the sphere of gender politics.

The extremely brave intersex woman Claire Graham (aka @MRKHvoice on Twitter, her latest account after a series of arbitrary bannings for upsetting the wrong people with statements of biological fact) recently compiled a list of things which are now deemed “transphobic” by trans activists, and given the transience and vulnerability of anything published on Twitter, we thought it was a good idea to preserve it here, with some additions of our own and from others.

[EDIT 9 Dec 2019: Claire has of course now been permanently banned and her original list deleted by Twitter.]

We’ve previously noted how alarmingly this sort of extremist, intolerant and openly violent male bullying in the guise of progressive political correctness has been used in recent months to silence all sorts of people (mainly but not exclusively feminists).

Politicians, police and numerous other authorities in both Scotland and the UK have been complicit – whether intentionally or not – in enabling a terrifying “woke” culture of censorship and intimidation in which the wishes of the vast majority of the public are about to be simply ridden roughshod over, resulting in the creation of laws which could have (and are already having) absolutely horrific consequences.

Anyone raising issues, however, is liable to find themselves at the centre of a vicious storm of outrage, abuse or worse. So if you’re concerned about the imminent abolition of sex but want to stay out of trouble, here’s the stuff you need to avoid.

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Alert readers may recall our ongoing enquiry with the Scottish Conservatives and the Information Commissioner’s Office about what may or may not constitute a lawful and legitimate “petition”, if one is conducted over a period of several years (during which signatories may changes their opinions, or die) and is never delivered to its supposed recipient, but merely used as a data-harvesting device.

And excitingly there’s been a new twist.

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The BBC came in for a spot of criticism this week when its new BBC Scotland channel opted to show some snooker instead of Nicola Sturgeon’s major speech about a new independence referendum. But then things started to get weird.

An alert Wings reader noted that they hadn’t been able to locate any coverage by the state broadcaster of the SNP’s annual conference this weekend either, even though they send live cameras to just about any other party’s gatherings even if they amount to three people in a phone box (hi, Scottish Lib Dems).

The plot swiftly thickened.

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Just you wait and see.

Scottish political pundits: they’ve got all the pieces in their hands, but they still haven’t even worked out that it’s a jigsaw.

So there was a football match at the weekend.

At least three people were stabbed, one very seriously, in violent incidents the likes of which haven’t been seen around Scottish football for years.

But it was probably just a random, unforseeable one-off, right?

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Yesterday afternoon the Labour list MSP Jenny Marra tweeted this allegation about Dr Drew Walker, the Director Of Public Health for NHS Tayside:

It wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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Nicola Sturgeon attended a meeting of the SNP NEC yesterday.

Or maybe she didn’t.

One of these people/publications, inescapably, is flat-out lying to their readers about the event in question. Given the Scottish media’s ingrained habit of lying about pretty much everything almost all of the time, we honestly wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to which one of them it was.

To anyone observing Scottish politics with even half a keen eye, it was obvious from very early on that former athlete Brian Whittle was one of the stupider and nastier elements of the 2016 crop of new Tory MSPs, having been thrashed by more than 12,400 votes in the election but foisted on taxpayers anyway via the list system.

(Trivia fact: Whittle is Holyrood’s most comprehensively rejected MSP. Nobody else in the 2016 election was beaten by such a big margin but still ended up in Parliament. He makes Murdo Fraser – who lost Perthshire North by 10,353 in his seventh defeat on the trot but still got a seat – look like a beacon of popularity by comparison.)

Indeed, an interview in today’s Holyrood Magazine reveals that Whittle is SUCH a dim bulb, he didn’t even realise that if you got elected as an MSP you had to actually go and do the job.

But astoundingly, that’s not even nearly the dumbest thing he says in it.

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